Sunday, August 21, 2016

State Department Uses Josh
Rogin to Justify Bogus Blacklisting of MEK

by Rabbi Daniel
M. Zucker

American
Thinker, March 18, 2012

Last week, the United States Department of State stooped to a new
low in its attempt to justify its nearly fifteen-year-old misguided policy of
regarding the pro-secular, pro-democracy Iranian resistance organization known
as the Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK) as a terrorist
organization. This time, State decided to use ForeignPolicy's
Josh Rogin to publish a canard against the MEK.

In an article entitled "Are the MEK's U.S. friend its worst enemies?," published by Foreign Policy on
Thursday, March 8, 2012, Mr. Rogin quotes an anonymous State Department
official to throw mud at the MEK. Avoiding context, Rogin starts his
article by calling the MEK "a State Department-designated foreign
terrorist organization." A more accurate description would have
noted -- as did Norman Kempster of the Los Angeles
Times -- that the State Department's designation of the MEK as a
"foreign terrorist organization" was made for political reasons.
Kempster put it this way: "One senior Clinton administration
official said inclusion of the People's Moujahedeen was intended as a goodwill
gesture to Tehran and its newly elected moderate president, Mohammad
Khatami." After fifteen years, it's clear how totally unsuccessful
that Albright-Clinton "goodwill gesture" has proven to be.

Rogin continues his inaccuracies when he describes the MEK's
twenty-seven-year base at Camp Ashraf as "its secretive Iraqi home."
Camp Ashraf has never been secretive at all; in its independent existence
before the Multi-National Force-Iraq invasion of March-April 2003, under the
leadership of MEK theoretician Massoud Rajavi, Ashraf was open to
everyone. Indeed, Mr. Rajavi invited Human Rights Watch director Christopher
George to visit when HRW accused the MEK of human rights violations1, something George and his
successor, Joe Stork, did in 1992, 1997, and 2005. Each set of
allegations was met by an invitation to visit, but HRW never bothered to
accept. From May 2003 until January 2009, Camp Ashraf was controlled by
the U.S. Army, and many friends of the MEK, as well as Iraqis of all
ethnic and religious backgrounds, visited the camp, as did journalists from
around the world. Indeed, this writer was invited by the MEK to
visit in the spring of 2009 but was denied a visa by the government of Prime
Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki. The only thing "secretive"
about Camp Ashraf has been the al-Maliki government's cooperation with Iran's
Qods Force to isolate and suppress the residents of Ashraf.

Rogin says Martin Kobler of the UNAMI worked tirelessly to assist
in making arrangements to move the residents of Ashraf to Camp Liberty outside
Baghdad. Agreements made in December between Mr. Kobler and MEK concerning
conditions were not met, and indeed, the Iraqi government, assisted by agents
of the Iranian Qods Force, made sure to make conditions at Camp Liberty
unlivable -- much like in the two-and-a-half-year campaign launched against
Ashraf, which has seen the Iraqi regime cut off all water, gasoline, and oil
supplies; restrict food supplies; and deny medical supplies, as well as access
to medical treatment, to the residents of Ashraf.

Rogin implies that it is the MEK which made the
negotiations difficult; the opposite is true. It has been the government
of Iraq that has consistently been intransigent. Rogin alleges that
members of MEK may be armed; after living under U.S. Army control for
five and a half years, having voluntarily disarmed in May 2003, and then being
surrounded by units of the Iraqi Army since January 2009, twice being invaded
and assaulted by the latter, with scores of fatalities and nearly 1,000
casualties with no MEK use of weapons to defend themselves, from where
would these alleged weapons magically materialize?

Rogin sites a State Department official for his information but
fails to supply a name or notes to back up his claims. The State Department
under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton has not been exactly impartial in
everything concerning the MEK and Camp Ashraf. The Washington Circuit
Court, after hearing the State Department's case against the MEK on
January 11, 2010, ordered the State Department on July 26, 2010 to review its
case within 180 days. The State Department stalled until recently ordered
to comply with a deadline of March 26, 2012. Mrs. Clinton, aware of the
current conditions at Camp Liberty -- in which the space allotted to the MEK by
the December 2011 agreements has been diminished by over 95%, and units of the
Iraqi army and Qods Force agents enter Camp Liberty to harass the Ashraf
contingent, the majority being women -- has said that compliance with the move
will help determine the Department's decision about the MEK staying on
the FTO or not. A more blatant power-move to force the MEK to
comply with conditions that allow for its suppression by pro-Iranian regime
Iraqis is hard to imagine.

Rogin cites a New York Times advertisement of March
3 which decries conditions at Camp Liberty. He quotes an unnamed Obama
administration official who allegedly works on the issue claiming that it is
the MEK that is trashing the camp. Yet Rogin doesn't name his source or
provide photos or video to back up his story, and he relies on an official who
I suspect works for the State Department but has been to neither Iraq nor
either Camp Ashraf or Camp Liberty.

Accusing the lengthy list of dignitaries who support delisting the
MEK, including former FBI Director Louis Freeh, Homeland Security Secretary Tom
Ridge, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, National Security Advisor General
James Jones, CIA Director Porter Goss, and a variety of generals of not doing
their homework on the subject is disingenuous in the extreme. All of
these former government officials have testified that there is no evidence to
link the MEK to terrorism and that it is the Stare Department's Iran-appeasers
who are insisting on keeping the MEK tied up with the false "terrorist"
label. It is the Obama administration that failed to do its homework
about the Iranian regime, failed to support the June-July 2009 "Green
Revolution," and allowed the Iranian regime to murder thousands of its
freedom-seeking youths without a word of rebuke for the regime's brutality or a
word of encouragement to those seeking freedom.

As regards Rogin's description of Maryam Rajavi and her close
advisers in the National Council of Resistance of Iran, it is clear than Rogin
bought his source's portrait "hook, line, and sinker"; such a
description comes straight out of the propaganda machine of the Iranian
Ministry of Intelligence and Security (VEVAK), and his anonymous source
shows an uncritical acceptance of Iranian disinformation. Rogin clearly
did not check whether such material was accurate or a screed by contacting the
NCRI for an interview. Had he done so, he would have written an entirely
different piece.

And finally, as regards the question of a possible move to the
Jordanian side of the Iraqi-Jordanian border, Rogin once again misrepresents
the situation completely by calling the suggested camp "militarized."
For the nth time,
the MEK voluntarily disarmed and has remained disarmed since its
agreement with the U.S. Army in May 20032.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel M. Zucker is founder and Chairman of the Board of Americans
for Democracy in the Middle-East. He may be contacted at contact@ADME.ws.

NOTES:

1 See footnotes 199 through 213 of the
report, and the text that they support.

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About Me

Rabbi Dr. Daniel M. Zucker founded Americans for Democracy in the Middle-East in 2005, an organization dedicated to teaching the public and our elected officials about the dangers of Islamic radical fundamentalism and the need to develop genuine democratic institutions in the region. Rabbi Zucker has organized and led briefings at the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate., and has spoken at human rights conferences at the United Nations, and delivered speeches at the 2005 National Conference for a Democratic, Secular Iran, at the 2006 Iranian National Convention in Washington, DC., and at the 2005 and 2006 Maryam Rajavi Iranian Freedom Convocations in Paris.
Rabbi Zucker is the author of over one hundred articles on the Middle-East.